The Trouble with Time, Part 5 - Dogs

"Only four more, no problem."

Oh, how she now regrets ever saying those words out loud. It's been a few days since she caught the breeze, and she's only managed to get one of the items on the list. Once again the horrible pressure of time is here to try and overtake her, the feeling of not being able to do this. The crushing feeling that everything is hopeless and she should just give up. She wants to give in to it.

She won't. She will try, until the last drops of her time falls and it is certain to be too late.

It was the same evening she caught the breeze that she found this place. Since then, all she's done has been trying to find the nerve to enter. She stands at the fence, staring through to the other side, hoping the dogs won't find her today. Yesterday she tried to go in, but they heard the noise of her climbing the fence or something, at which point they rushed in, and in her terror all she could do was fall back to safety and get some big bruises to seal the deal. She has spent the whole of today trying to find the courage to come back. She knows she has to. If not now, then soon.

So here she is, staring at the fence, not feeling courageous at all. It's not her fault, she tries to tell herself. It doesn't matter.

When she was a kid, a neighbor's dog attacked her. It was twice her size, and it snapped, and she had to stay in the hospital for the night. And even then it took a long, long time (in her child's memory) for her arm and leg to heal properly. She doesn't remember what happened to the dog.

Don't think about it.

Ever since then, she has been scared of dogs. Especially big ones, but even the tiny ones make her nervous whenever she passes one on the street. Even after all these years.

I said don't think about it.

She takes a deep breath. Maybe the dogs aren't here tonight. Maybe they're taking a night off, gone out with the owner somewhere. Or. Or. Maybe she doesn't need to do this and it doesn't matter if the dogs are here. Maybe there's another way.

No. There isn't. Now get in there before the dogs come back.

"Why does it have to be dogs..." she mutters to herself.

She lifts a shaking hand onto the upper part of the fence and grips tight. The cold steel feels good in her palm. Luckily it's not so cold that it would be painful to hold on to steel with bare skin. A mitten wouldn't give her a proper grip.

She steps on one of the lower bars and pulls herself up. She tries to focus on the movements her body is making. Step, grip, step, grip. She swings a leg over the fence and stops. Listens. Nothing. There's no sound. Only the hum of the traffic from a block down.

She lowers herself on the other side of the wall, stops to listen again. The garden is still quiet. She starts walking quietly, trying very, very hard not to make a sound. She's lucky the snow has melted again; at least she won't leave prints.

Over the days she's been able to figure out where the tree grows in the garden. It took hours of circling and circling, but eventually she found an angle from which she could see it, far on the other edge of the garden. On the edge she now sneaks through. She's almost certain she knows she's going in the right direction.

And then she gets past a fence of junipers and she sees it. The berries are still in the tree, as they should be. Her heart leaps. It took days, but now she--

She freezes. There's a sound coming from somewhere to her left. Something coming towards her.

She's running, full sprint, back towards the fence before the dogs even start barking. Her heart is in her throat. There is space in her head for nothing except the fence, which isn't getting any closer, and the teeth and claws catching up with her every fraction of a second. The moment stretches to infinity.

She crashes into the fence, jumps, grabs the top. Something almost closes around her left foot, but she manages to pull it away before she gets trapped. She drops down, lands heavily, almost twists her ankle. The world becomes a blur.

The next steady thing she is able to understand is Kevin's arms, holding her steady as she tries to catch her breath, sobbing, back at the antique store.
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 The topic for tomorrow is Sword.

~matleena